Mauricio Pochettino will use friendlies against Belgium and Portugal to answer the final World Cup roster questions<\/p>\n
When the US men\u2019s national team booked Belgium and Portugal for the final pair of friendlies before the 2026 World Cup roster is named, it looked like a couple solid tests against European teams who will expect to reach this World Cup\u2019s business end. They should be worthy tests of the US\u2019s readiness for big matchups that could await if they advance from Group D. Oddly, they are also a pair of foes from the US\u2019s 2014 World Cup campaign.<\/p>\n
This will hardly resemble a 12-year reunion, though. Belgium arrives without Romelu Lukaku and Thibaut Courtois, two of the few remaining members from that round-of-16 clash that ended the United States\u2019 tournament<\/a>. Portugal arrives without the injured Cristiano Ronaldo, slightly dulling the demand for what might have been a hot ticket in Atlanta.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Mauricio Pochettino will use friendlies against Belgium and Portugal to answer the final World Cup roster questions When the US men\u2019s national team booked Belgium and Portugal for the final pair of friendlies before the 2026 World Cup roster is named, it looked like a couple solid tests against European teams who will expect to … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70038"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70038\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}